Summit starts in a last-ditch effort to solve EU debt crisis

by Michael Birnbaum - Dec. 7, 2011 08:40 PMWashington Post

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European leaders gathering here today for a summit billed as the last, best chance to save the euro are scrambling to forge a landmark pact aimed at deepening integration and quelling a debt crisis that has become the single-biggest threat to the global economy.

With Europe facing what leaders are calling its greatest test in generations, the region's nations are trying to unite behind a plan by Friday that could go as far as rewriting European Union treaties to automatically punish overspending governments, squeezing a process that would normally take years, if not decades, into the next several months.

But frictions were already breaking out Wednesday, with the Germans in particular bitterly rejecting suggestions that a less lofty pact might be more easily struck and a top official in Berlin declaring that some European leaders still failed to grasp the "seriousness of the situation."

European diplomats warned that the summit could push beyond the Friday deadline in the quest for a workable deal.

For Europe, a signed pact would begin to answer a pivotal question: Will the region pull closer together, fixing some of the fundamental flaws of the euro union, or risk the eurozone breaking apart?

For the rest of the world, however, the summit is revolving around a far more basic question: This time, will European leaders finally get it right?

Thus far, every attempt by European leaders to address a debt crisis that started in tiny Greece two years ago has failed, allowing the region's turbulence to spread to the larger economies of Italy, Spain and even France.

And though the pact being worked out could be the most ambitious attempt to address the crisis to date, the verdict is out on whether it will be enough.

Europe's crisis now is as much political as economic.

It is a legacy of overspending and overborrowing.

But in a region of vast financial means, it is also about a lack of investor faith in the will of financially solid nations like Germany to unite behind their troubled neighbors to shore up the currency union.